Tara Maya's Tales

 

  There's nothing wrong with a good Dystopia, but I love positive, optimistic Science Fiction. The great thing about being an author is that if you don't see the genre you want to read more of, you can write it yourself.  I said to myself, "I want to see some SF that has a bright future. Not a utopia, but not, 'we're all going to live in a grungy, grey, overpopulated world, eating bugs, ruled by a 'Corporation' that acts more like the CCP where the only hope is to run away or overthrow the government.'" In the interests of full disclosure, I started a Dystopian series one year during NaNoWriMo, which was a science fiction retelling of Persephone and Hades. I found that story on my hard drive -- 50,000 words of a novel -- and thought, "Hey, this is good, why didn't I write the rest?" So I might still publish a Dysopia!  But, ahem, back to the non-dystopia idea... Rachel Huffmire has a post on " Hopepunk " which isn't too ...

When I was first trying to capture my ideas in stories, I was always stymmied by my own clumsy words, which never sufficed to capture the story in the least. The truth is that my writing ability, my grammar and sentence structure, my knowledge of technical issues like how many words to put in a scene, how to describe setting, how to convey dialog, how to outline a novel and keep at it, until the draft was complete... yes, all that was lacking.  I carried on, which turned out to be the right thing to do. First of all, you can't learn any of the technical bits of writing without writing . But second of all, and most importantly, I learned that I will never capture that perfect novel, that perfect expression of character, that faceted jewel made of words through which the perfect idea shines, because it is as elusive as heaven. It is a dream of perfection, but books are like people, they are imperfect but beloved anyway, because they are real. They can point to something, even if they...

Christine McConnell Villains are tough for me to write. Here's three tricks that I use to grapple with them. 1. Nature as a villain, a villain by nature I harbor a secret wish to redeem everyone, even the worst villains. In a story where I control all the parameters, it's easy to give in to this temptation.  Yet an antagonistic force is necessary for a good story. Few books can pull off using the environment alone (Person v Nature) as the antagonistic force. It's not impossible; one fantastic book to do this recently was The Martian. The enemy in that book was Mars itself: life versus death. Simple, stark and utterly believable. When you pit one man against an entire planet, any extra villains would have only detracted from the majesty and terror of the real enemy, surviving on a planet completely alien to the one where our species evolved, a planet alien to life itself. Some villains, for instance, an animal, an alien or a demonic force, could be evil simply by nature. 2. ...

I've been diagnosed (informally, by anyone who has visited my domicile) as suffering from Selective Liminal Object Beholding, a mild but annoying brain disfunction. It's not life-threatening, but it impacts my quality of life and the lives of those who live with me. It may be contagious, but only after long exposure. It may also have a genetic component. Those who suffer from Selective Liminal Object Beholding may very well be on the same spectrum--the opposite end--as Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. Whereas those with OCD suffer from the overactive need to straighten things up and put things in order, often despite no objective problem in the environment, those who suffer from SLOB are able to walk through a messy house, completely oblivious of and indifferent to the sink full of dirty dishes, the oven that was left on, the unmopped corner of the floor, the fact that the cabinet door is slightly ajar, the piles of dirty clothing strewn over furniture, the wet towel hanging ove...

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Naya could walk quickly when she needed to. She could not actually fly, but she could flow as fast as a river over the land, seeking out all the low spots, working with the terrain rather than against it. Her light, skipping steps quickly brought her to the spot in the river that her tree had requested. To her amazement, just as she arrived, she saw a huge pick-up truck, the kind that many of her workers used to haul wood and rocks, careen down the hill, headed toward the river. Naya realized it was going to splash into the river and possibly drown whoever was inside. She could see there was an occupant, although he appeared to be passed out. Normally, the shield around her forest kept out intruders, whether mundane or arcane. How had he smuggled his truck in here? Her spell particularly kept out any heavy machinery or vehicles because she didn’t like them driving around her forest, scarring the trees and crushing the shrubs. Either a powerful counterspell had brought him here—or for ...

  There are certain issues writers always struggle with.  When do I show versus tell? Am I using too much passive voice? Should I write to please the market or to please myself? It's always a struggle to find that balance between "write what appeals to a large audience" vs "write what appeals to me even if I'm the only one who gets a kick out of it."  I don't write anything I don't have some interest in, but since I want to earn a living... or at least enough money to support my crippling book addiction... I need to sell books that people want to read. And, to be honest, I want to write books that please a large number of readers. I write partly for the joy of knowing that I've shared a story that touched another soul, whether to entertain with a light, sprightly tale or with a deeper, more complex epic. I love it when readers write to me and tell me, to paraphrase one letter I particularly cherish: "Something in your book helped me deal wit...

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